SCEC INSTANeT News
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SCEC INSTANeT News |
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SCEC Welcomes Thomas H. Jordan to Southern California, USC and SCEC |
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Tom Jordan, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and internationally renowned geophysicist, has come to USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be the W. M. Keck Professor of Geophysics in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences' department of earth sciences. In September, he was confirmed by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Board of Directors as the new scientific director. The Center was established in 1991 as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center with guaranteed support through January, 2002. Jordan, an energetic scientist who served as a member of the SCEC advisory council for ten years, comes to USC with a bold vision for the Center. "SCEC is the largest organized effort for the study of earthquakes in the country. As a Center, we have important work yet to do and should continue in our role as a major center for earthquake research. Southern California is the best natural laboratory for our work: half the nation's earthquake risk is here, with the biggest portion right here in Los Angeles County," Jordan said in a recent interview with USC's Chronicle (Volume 20 Issue 7: 10/9/2000). In collaboration with SCEC Director Tom Henyey and SCEC Board Chair Bernard Minster, Jordan is preparing a proposal for a five-year extension in response to encouragement from the NSF and the southern California earthquake science community (see "The SCEC Transition" ). At the SCEC annual meeting held in September in Oxnard, California, the SCEC scientific community jointly agreed to continue the Center through a joint proposal to the NSF and USGS. The proposal will be submitted on December 1, 2000. In his own research, Jordan made a series of major discoveries about the three-dimensional structure of the earth's interior. As he explained recently to USC's Chronicle, he uses the waves from earthquakes to look deep inside the earth in an effort to understand the machinery that drives plate tectonics. The surface motions of the plates are a manifestation of the convection in the earth's solid mantle, and he and his group have been able to show that this convection goes very deep. Other areas of interest include studies
of the structure and evolution of the continents, plate motions,
plate-boundary deformations, slow earthquakes and seafloor morphology. Jordan earned his B.S. (1969), M.S. (1970) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees at the California Institute of Technology and taught at Princeton University in New Jersey and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC-San Diego, before going to MIT in 1984. There, he was the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and headed the earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences department -- a department more than twice the size of USC's -- from 1988 to 1998, before spending a one-year sabbatical at USC. "USC's earth sciences department may be small, but it is outstanding," said Jordan to the Chronicle. Describing his interest in joining USC, he said he was partly drawn by its strength in the information sciences: "Information technology is an increasingly important part of the infrastructure of all scientific research. SCEC, for example, is a truly distributed community, involving over 30 universities spread out across the country, and we need strong information science tools to collaborate effectively on our research." SCEC, with Jordan's guidance, plans to collaborate with the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to bring new IT tools to earthquake science. |
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Phone 213/740-5843 Fax 213/740-0011 e-mail: SCECinfo@usc.edu |
